He banged on the hood of her car, making more noise than he intended.
Elizabeth jumped up, her hair wild, her glasses still on but not quite resting on her nose. Huddie wanted to calm her down and he wanted to slap some sense into her.
“Max died,” she said, holding on to the steering wheel.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Why don’t you get out of the car? Come on in and wash up and I’ll make us coffee.” It was the kind thing to do, it was also the most convenient and the least likely to destroy his life, which seemed highly perishable and sweet and in need of immediate care. Elizabeth wasn’t a weeper; it would probably be okay to set her up at the table near the back, even if other people came in.
Huddie filled two mugs with fresh coffee and put a pile of rugalach on a plate, although his impulse was to hand her a to-go cup and a muffin in a bag. He showed her the bathroom and hugged her before she closed the door. He said he was sorry about Max, and he was sorry about the old man, seemed like a sad end to a sad life, but the real issue was that Elizabeth was now free to leave and might require a reason to stay.
Sunday night, on the way home from the movies, Huddie’s arm began to tremble under Larry’s sleep-heavy head. June had lifted Larry’s head with one hand and folded up her sweater to make a pillow for him. Elizabeth doesn’t know how to do that. He can’t see her lifting Larry’s head so smoothly it seems to grow out of her fingers, can’t see her traveling with a comfortable sweater, extra kleenex, Life Savers, and a Frog and Toad book scrunched into a big vinyl purse.
June has four capacious, indestructible tote bags, in black, brown, navy, and bone. She is embarrassed and proud, too, defiant about her bags, all just like her mamas pocketbooks, and when they window-shop, she looks sideways at tiny evening bags with thin, pointless straps, jewel-studded bouquets, playful minaudières, and she shakes her head. “Not for the mother of Larry.” She doesn’t say anything about what the wife of Horace should wear. He won’t tell her, and she makes herself believe, whistling in the dark of love’s signless neighborhood, that he does like her, must love her, as Larry’s mother, and will then come upon her, and love her, as June.
She fell in love as he spun through Michigan, a hundred times handsomer than the other handsome boys, kinder than the other sports stars. Even girls he slept with only once had nothing bad to say about him. A big hello for everyone, putting his arm around every girl, including the plain and dull, as if it were a privilege and a pleasure, always making it clear that his singleness was not due to any shortcoming on their part, but entirely and only because he hadn’t been ready. And each woman knew that if he’d been ready, it would have happened with her. He attended eighteen weddings in four states the summer after his senior year.
June’s small circle barely overlapped his; her friends were Christian, future nurses and social workers and mothers, and they held themselves apart from the radical girls with wide Afros and new names and hoop earrings to their shoulders, and apart from the Black Power boys in tight jeans and berets, sexy and scary and wrong, and they held themselves apart from the white girls who were everywhere, Jewish girls with auburn Afros and little blue glasses on their long noses, Protestant girls with Breck-shampoo blonde hair, flat as silk to their skinny behinds, managing to apologize for that hair and still toss it around a room like Stardust. If June had not moved to Boston, by chance and because her mother’s best friend was director of a nursing program, she might have lost Huddie sooner. But she saw him play two games for the Celtics (her mother’s best friend was a fan, had touched the smooth hands of JoJo White and wept during John Havlicek’s last game), jumping to the very rim of the basket, above the heads of bigger men, and she saw him fall to the hardwood floor like wet laundry. She heard the snap before she saw him curl up, grey with pain, and although it broke her heart, she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t play again.
She had a girlfriend hand-deliver a sympathetic and encouraging card to his hospital room. She wrote Huddie about her old boyfriend who broke his knee and went on to play three more seasons (in high school and badly, she did not write) and sent a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies. After two weeks, she sent another batch of cookies to his apartment with a friendly, dignified note on her own stationery suggesting the name of a good physical therapist. Finally he had to thank her, and as sweetly as she could, she kept him on the phone until a visit seemed in order. She was maid, secretary, cheerleader, and rehab assistant. She did not presume to call herself girlfriend, and when the model types were around she faded, and when they stopped coming, when his contract was not renewed and the Phoenix Suns went back on their offer and the Italians sent only a case of Barbaresco and their condolences, she made spaghetti with Italian sausage and listened while Huddie talked about red wine and the kind of restaurant he’d like to run. She finished nursing school and they were still together. And he had not found his feet in real estate or insurance or franchises and he didn’t sleep well or long. He never blamed anyone. June was happy to be pregnant, happy to be a pediatric nurse, happy to leave the terrible cold and terrible white people of Boston, happy to be handsome, kind Huddie Lester’s wife. She willed him to be happy with her.
In some alternate universe, Huddie and Elizabeth would make love every day, without fear or hurry, and if he had to, he would lie about it to June until kingdom come, lie willingly and shamelessly, lie and feel lucky to have the opportunity. But in this precarious world, he will not leave June and he will not become a man who sees his son every other Saturday and sends a check. Will not. Will not be another successful black man leaving his fine, kind, bronze-skinned wife for a white woman. A crazy white woman, with no common sense, no prospects, less of a foothold in the world than he had. A woman who doesn’t even see the thousand things he has taught himself to ignore, the thousand things June knows, without discussion. Elizabeth has split herself open for him without knowing who enters her, the hundreds he carries with him, right to the bed, how much he owes to people she cannot even imagine. Marry this educated white girl whose people have money and still move down. Unbelievable.
The early morning crowd came and went. In ten minutes Michelle and John would drive up, put on their aprons, and go about their business. And Michelle would look at them as a black woman does, and John would look at them as a black man does, and much as they liked him, much as they owed him for various kindnesses of the past two years, the air at work would shift and June would hear. Huddie put a note on the cash register—“Back by 8:15. John, Basket Hill produce in the back. Michelle, bag yesterday’s bread for St. Vincent de Paul. Horace”—and drove Elizabeth to Wadsworth Park.
“We need to step back, sweetheart. Not step away, but step back. I think so.”
Elizabeth picked up handfuls of wet leaves and let them drop.
“We could just go on like this.”
“I can’t. I can’t go from this to my real life. I can’t have this not be my real life.”
“You love me so much we have to break up.”
“Shit. Yes.”
Elizabeth shook her head.
“How about you love me so much you leave June?”
Huddie shook his head.
“Well, I must be the dumbest woman in North America. I did not see this coming.”
“Sweet. Elizabeth. You don’t see things coming. You never did.”
“I will. Someday I will see things coming and I will jump out of the way. And if I see you, I’ll run in the opposite direction. And if you see me first, you should do the same, you gutless son of a bitch. Drive me to Max’s.”
They drove in silence, wet-faced, two shrinking loose piles in the corners of the front seat, Huddie steering with two shaking fingers, Elizabeth’s head on her chest. She shut the car door carefully. Surely, at the edge of the curb, at the corner, at the blurred traffic light, at the crumbling stucco arch over the entrance to Max’s building, surely at some stopping point one of them would see that it could go another way, that it must, but Elizabeth finds her key and Huddie speeds through the changing yellow light.